SMRs and AMRs

Thursday, September 18, 2014

The NFL Has a Lower Rate of Domestic Violence Than the General Population

Posted by Ross Pomeroy September 18, 2014, Real Clear Science

This year, three National Football League players -- Adrian Peterson, Ray Rice, and Greg Hardy -- have either admitted to or been convicted of domestic violence. Their stories coalesced into a storm this past week with the release of a damning new video of Ray Rice punching his wife (then fiancée) and the indictment of Adrian Peterson, debatably the NFL's best running back, for child abuse.

The media onslaught of updates, analysis, and opinion on what has been called the National Football League's "worst week ever" leaves a distinct impression: the NFL is a league stocked full of criminals.

Evidence, however, doesn't bear that out.

Back in 1999, leading criminologist Alfred Blumstein teamed up with author Jeff Benedict, who has written five books focused on crime and athletics, to compare rates of criminal violence among NFL players to that of the general population. Controlling for age, they found that the annual rate of assault and domestic violence among NFL players was less than half that of the general population.

(More here.)

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